Behind the 50 km of resort beach lies the oldest colonised ground in the Americas. Three days trace Taíno rock art in flooded caves, the Dominican Republic's holiest shrine at Higüey, and the sugar and cattle estates that built the east.
A 20 km cave system with Taíno ceremonial chambers reached by rappel descent; guides show pictographs and pottery shards left by the Ciguayo who used it as a rain-god sanctuary. Full-day trips run 08:00–17:00.
State-run cave museum on the Río Soco with 500 metres of lit walkway past 472 Taíno pictographs and petroglyphs, including the famed row of dancing figures. Open Tue–Sun 09:00–17:00, wheelchair-accessible section.
The freshwater spring caves on Saona where Taíno villagers drew water before 1494; Columbus landed on this island on his second voyage and Spanish chroniclers recorded a settlement of some 500 bohíos here.
A 75 m limestone sinkhole at the foot of the Anamuya cliffs, one of the freshwater eyes the Taíno considered entrances to Coaybay, the land of the dead. Cenotes like this fed the Higüey chiefdom of cacica Higuanamá.
The 1971 concrete parabolic arch basilica by French architects Dunoyer and Gleize, built to house the 16th-century Altagracia icon. Its 80 m arch draws a million pilgrims each 21 January. Open daily 07:00–19:00.
The 1572 stone parish church, the oldest standing building in the east and successor to the 1502 settlement founded by Juan Ponce de León. Its single nave and mudéjar timber roof survived hurricanes that levelled the rest of the colonial town.
A 1780s sugar mill with an intact hydraulic wheel-house and boiling train, site of the 1796 enslaved-workers' revolt led by Ana María. Declared a national monument; the aqueduct and slave-quarter foundations are still legible.
The 1911 American-owned mill still runs 500 km of narrow-gauge cane track — the last working sugar railway in the Caribbean. Steam locomotives from the 1920s sit at the Batey Central yard beside the mill gates.
A 1976 replica 16th-century Mediterranean village carved from coral stone by Italian designer Roberto Copa, with a 5,000-seat Grecian amphitheatre inaugurated by Frank Sinatra in 1982. The Regional Museum holds Taíno artefacts from the Chavón valley.
One of the Haitian-Dominican cane villages built for cutters in the 1920s, still lived in by third-generation families. Wooden barrack rows, a company chapel and the old scale house tell the labour history behind the sugar economy.
A working chinchal where torcedores roll Cibao-valley leaf by hand using the entubado method Cuban exiles brought after 1961. Tours cover seed-to-cigar and the 1990s boom that made Dominican tobacco the world's top export.
The 1,500-acre reserve set aside in 1994 by the resort's founders holds an indigenous garden of Taíno food plants — yuca, guáyiga, mamey — and a reconstructed bohío showing pre-Columbian building technique.